Amazon launches UK MP3 store with bargain prices
By John Lister
Amazon has launched a UK version of its music download store with some prices half those on iTunes. Analysts are question whether it’s a loss-leader strategy or if Amazon has negotiated particularly good deals with publishers.
Whereas iTunes generally charges between £5.99 and £7.99 for an album, the new Amazon store has some new releases available for as little as £3. And unlike iTunes which has a fixed rate for individual songs of 79p, Amazon songs range from 59p to 89p.
(Amazon actually has a link to ‘albums below £2’ but this appears to be some form of bug as the results which come up are all single tracks.)
While there are several other music download services which undercut iTunes in the UK, this is the first time a true household name site has been so competitive. Amazon also has the advantage that, as with the iTunes store, its one-click system makes the most of impulse purchases.
Music industry researcher Mark Mulligan told Web User that Amazon’s prices appear so low it may actually be taking a loss on popular albums to attract attention to the store, which means the prices might not last. He said the other main explanation would be that Amazon has managed to secure a lower payment to record labels. That’s certainly not impossible: there’s been a notable trend of the music industry working to support rivals to iTunes, likely to keep Apple’s influence in check.
From a technical standpoint, the Amazon store offer 256kbit/s encoding compared with iTunes’ 128kbit/s. It also offers all tracks without Digital Rights Management protection, meaning they’ll work on all computers and players, something iTunes can’t yet offer.
There’s still a huge potential market for music downloads in Britain. While just 8 percent of music sales were downloads last year, the industry was worth more than 1 billion British pounds, third only to the US and Japan in an international survey.
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December 5th, 2008
I hope customers in the U.S. can buy from the UK MP3 store!
February 14th, 2009
I have been using the Amazon UK download site for a while, and although I have in the main found it easy to use, there are one or two small-ish issues that need addressing.
Despite the fanfare, not all of the tracks on Amazon are encoded at 256kbps, and when I contacted them regarding this I was told that ‘in the small print’ it states that 256 is only available ‘where possible’.
Secondly, another irritation that I have come across is that some tracks are ‘clipped’. Not clipped as in overmodulated, but the leading edge of the first note is cut off. Only a small issue for most people you might think, but if Amazon is going to try to attract customers with a higher encoding rate, the people that CAN tell the difference between 128 and 256 will certainly notice that the beginning of the track is chopped off!
Again, when I conveyed this view to Amazon, I was just given an offhand reply, which was not what I wanted to hear.
If anyone from Amazon or anyone responsible for loading music for download from the Amazon site needs someone to show them how to do it properly, please get in touch!